Presents an analysis of faculty dynamics in nursing curriculum situations based on the social theories of conflict, community power, and interest-group to form a political model representing stages in policy development. These stages are applied to curriculum change examples to show how social conflict and power plays cause problems. (MF)

Policymaking has been studied from a variety of conceptual perspectives. The political bargaining model, used in conjunction with the broader systems framework, constitutes a familiar approach to research regarding education policymaking at the state level. This paper focuses on the conceptual implications of a study which applied that approach to…